Two visions of commercial society in the eighteenth century

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Minchul Kim
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Commercial Society

Shipped but Not Sold

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Um
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Arabian Peninsula ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
The West ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
The Indian Ocean

In the early decades of the eighteenth century, Yemen hosted a lively community of merchants that came to the southern Arabian Peninsula from the east and the west, seeking, among other products, coffee, at a time when this new social habit was on the rise. Shipped but not Sold argues that many of the diverse goods that these merchants carried, bought, and sold at the port, also played ceremonial, social, and utilitarian roles in this intensely commercial society that was oriented toward the Indian Ocean. Including sumptuous foreign textiles and robes, Arabian horses, porcelain vessels, spices, aromatics, and Yemeni coffee, these items were offered, displayed, exchanged, consumed, or utilized by major merchants in a number of socially exclusive practices that affirmed their identity and status, but also sustained the livelihood of their business ventures. These traders invested these objects with layers of social meaning through a number of repetitive ceremonial exercises and observances, in addition to their everyday protocols of the trade. This study looks at what happened to these local and imported commodities that were diverted from the marketplace to be used for a set of directives that were seemingly quite non-transactional.

scholarly journals PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICAL AGENCY IN THE WRITINGS OF FREDERICK II OF PRUSSIA

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
AVI LIFSCHITZ
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
State Service ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
Window Dressing ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
The Status ◽  
Enlightenment Philosophy

Abstract Frederick II's writings have conventionally been viewed either as political tools or as means of public self-fashioning – part of his campaign to raise the status of Prussia from middling principality to great power. This article, by contrast, argues that Frederick's works must also be taken seriously on their own terms, and interpreted against the background of Enlightenment philosophy. Frederick's notions of kingship and state service were not governed mostly by a principle of pure morality or ‘humanitarianism’, as argued influentially by Friedrich Meinecke. On the contrary, the king's views were part and parcel of an eighteenth-century vision of modern kingship in commercial society, based on the benign pursuit of self-love and luxury. A close analysis of Frederick's writings demonstrates that authorial labour was integral to his political agency, publicly placing constraints on what could be perceived as legitimate conduct, rather than mere intellectual window-dressing or an Enlightened pastime in irresolvable tension with his politics.

Interesting Haydn: On Attention's Materials

2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
pp. 655-701 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Mathew
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Commercial Environment

This article examines the idea of interest and the interesting in the late eighteenth century through Haydn's London experiences of the 1790s. It argues that several of Haydn's London compositions, together with the surviving records of his English trips, bear the traces of a metropolitan mediascape and urban commercial environment in which attention and desire were newly conceivable in terms of the psychic “investments” of interest—a concept that notably oscillates between what we would nowadays consider separate economic and aesthetic meanings. Looking again at Haydn's late encounter with England's burgeoning commercial society might prompt musicologists to rethink the nature of their own scholarly interests, as well as the deeper histories of currently popular methodological paradigms that aim to resolve musicology's objects of study into networks of people and things gathered together by entangled interests and “concerns.”

Humane Markets

2019 ◽  
pp. 293-315
Author(s):  
James R. Otteson
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Institutions ◽  
Moral Concern ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Political Economic

Markets are often criticized for being amoral, if not immoral. The core of the “political economy” that arose in the eighteenth century, however, envisioned the exchanges that take place in commercial society as neither amoral nor immoral but indeed deeply humane. The claim of the early political economists was that transactions in markets fulfilled two separate but related moral mandates: they lead to increasing prosperity, which addressed their primary “economic” concern of raising the estates of the poor; and they model proper relations among people, which addressed their primary “moral” concern of granting a respect to all, including the least among us. They attempted to capture a vision of human dignity within political-economic institutions that enabled people to improve their stations. Their arguments thus did not bracket out judgments of value: they integrated judgments of value into their foundations and built their political economy on that basis.

The Riddle of Usury

2019 ◽  
pp. 49-65
Author(s):  
Francesca Trivellato
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Marine Insurance ◽  
Financial Contracts ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
Economic Behaviors

This chapter argues that Étienne Cleirac's words locate him at an important and little understood historical junction, when the late medieval habit of treating money and the economy as part of the moral and theological universe intersected with the emerging “science of commerce.” This literature assigned multifarious meanings to the word usury. Church doctrines about usury were neither uniform nor uncontested. The most salient phase in these debates occurred in the sixteenth century, when Catholic theologians devised new and subtle arguments about the legitimacy of various financial contracts, including marine insurance and bills of exchange, in order to control but not hamper the expansion of European commercial society. By the eighteenth century, writers of the ars mercatoria (writings on commerce and economy) treated the term usury as a placeholder for all sorts of unsavory economic behaviors, and because of the enduring influence of an earlier discourse, they often assumed that Jews personified such behaviors.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
James Livesey
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Transport Costs ◽  
Trade Networks ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Credit ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter talks about the elements of a new “thin” culture that was created in the European provinces in the eighteenth century. The capacity to manage change depended on the capacity for innovation, for reorientation to new values and ideas. It focuses on innovation particularly on the way new ideas created new kinds of cultural capacity. Global transformation at the beginning of the late eighteenth century was breath-taking in its scope. Growth rates in countries around the Atlantic began to rise and compound themselves annually as prices of a set of basic commodities became integrated across and between continents. Growth in trade networks was paralleled by the extension of public credit networks that stretched out to old empires and newly independent ex-colonies alike, imposing new disciplines and transforming politics. As new technologies lowered transport costs, they made possible exchanges on a new scale and intensity. The chapter also provides evidence that the diffusion of a profusion of manufactured objects and new experiences altered psychological character and the relationship of the species to the rest of nature. Commercial society promised, or threatened, to alter everything, even the foundations of human personality.

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